All Art Friday

All Art Friday

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ On view at Amon Carter Museum, Dallas/Fort Worth, through September 5: "Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s-50s". The show, which examines the aesthetic and conceptual approaches to modern art across the Americas, features 80 rarely seen paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, drawings, and films, including work from the museum's own collections of Alexander Calder (1898-1976), Stuart Davis (1892-1964), and Louise Nevelson (1899-1988). Work of Uruguayan Joaquin Torres-Garcia (1874-1949),  Venezuelan Jesus Rafael Soto (1923-2005), and Armenian Arshile Gorky (1904-1948). Avant-garde films by Mary Ellen Bute (1906-1983) and Dwinell Grant (1912-1991) are featured. The exhibition is part of the ACM's year-long celebration of modern art. In October, the museum opens "American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White".

Image above left: John Ferren (1905-1970), Paris Abstract, ca. 1935, oil on canvas. © Estate of John Ferren. Newark Museum.

✭ Glass sculptures by Jackie L. Braitman are presented in "Transparency" at Zenith Gallery, Washington, D.C., through September 30. A finallist in "Emerge 2004", a biennial international art glass competition, Braitman is showing for the first time at Zenith. She is an architectural designer by trade and began working in glass in 2003. Though primarily self-taught, Braitman has studied with such nationally known glass artists as Judy Conway, Jane Bruce, and Roger Thomas. Go here to view images from the exhibit. To see more of Braitman's artwork, which she creates in series, go here.

Image above right: Jackie Braitman, "Conformity, the New Leadership", glass, 19" x 28" x 28"

✭ Episcopal Church & Visual Arts' online exhibition "Fellowship Communion" may be seen here. Among the artists with works on view are Chuck Hoffman and Peg Carlson-Hoffman, Claire Joy, Marilyn Green, Robert Graham Harles, Sherry Hartman, Scott Fisher, Sin-Hee Chin, and Reuben Craft. In addition to photography, the exhibit includes mixed media works, enamels, acrylics on canvas, pen-and-ink drawing, pastels, gouache on paper, and oils on canvas.

✭ The University of Chicago's Smart Museum of Art is exhibiting through August 29 " 'People Wasn't Made to Burn': Ben Shahn and the Hickman Story". American social realist artist Ben Shahn documented in pen and ink drawings the story of James Hickman, who shot and killed the landlord of the West Side tenement in which he and his family lived after a fire destroyed the building and took the lives of Hickman's four children. The landlord had threatened to burn the building down. A definitive account of Hickman's trial, which attracted national attention, was published in Harper's Magazine with Shahn's illustrations. The exhibition features all 16 or the original drawings, which were donated to the museum by Leon Despres, Chicago alderman and one of Hickman's original defense attorneys. Menachem Wecker's excellent post about the Hickman story and Shahn's drawings is published here. Also see Wecker's "Can a Tenement Fire Be a Microcosm for the Holocaust? Ben Shahn's Hickman Drawings" in The Jewish Press, June 30, 2010; and Sigalit Zetouni's article about the exhibit in Chicago Life magazine, which offers additional and information about the backstory. The Smithsonian Archives of American Art contains an oral history interview with Shahn, conducted in 1964; go here for the transcript; for additional Shahn-related documents, go here.

Image above right: Ben Shahn. "Studies of the Hickman Murder Case: I cannot understand how she escaped it was a miracle. The lord was with her." Smart Museum of Art.

✭ San Antonio's McNay Art Museum has mounted "Neither Model nor Muse: Women as Artists". Comprising paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, photographs, and theatre designs, the exhibition ranges widely over the work of such artists as Sue Fuller, Lee Krasner, Barbara Hepworth, Chakaia Booker, Lesley Dill, April Gornik, Kiki Smith, Sonia Delaunay, Agnes Martin, Leonora Carrington, Dorothy Hood, and Louise Nevelson. The show is on view through September 12.

Neither Model nor Muse Exhibition Opening from McNay Art Museum on Vimeo.

✭ Paintings by Emily Eveleth are featured in "Luscious" at Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts. Presented in conjunction with a Museums10 collaborative project "Table for Ten: The Art, History and Science of Food" and on view until October 24, the show includes Eveleth's monumental canvases as well as her small wood panels. Eveleth is a 1983 graduate of Smith College.

Audience 2.0: Technology and Arts Participation

The National Endowment for the Arts released in late June a multi-media report "Audience 2.0: How Technology Influences Arts Participation". Drawing on a 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, the report examines American adults' patterns of participation in the arts via electronic and digital media. Some of its findings are:

♦ More than half of all U.S. adults (53 percent; 118 million) participated in the arts through electronic and digital media.

♦ Fifteen percent of Americans (34 million) used electronic media to view or listen to a program about books or writers.

♦ Americans who participated in arts through electronic media reported attending, on average,  twice as many live arts events as non-media participants and in a greater variety of live art forms.

♦ The likelihood of Americans with at least some college education to engage in the arts through media was 24 percentage points greater than for Americans with a grade school education.